Essentially, getting to a research problem statement is a matter of doing an exhaustive—and maybe exhausting—literature review. You want to master the existing knowledge about your topic so that you know both what is known and what is not yet known about it. You'll eventually have a list of things not yet known, and you will select which of those you want to study. Then you'll write all this up in a literature review, which culminates in a succinct statement of the problem you have chosen to research.
A research problem is first of all not a social problem, such as racism or unemployment, nor an organizational problem such as how to motivate employees. These "real-world problems" might inspire a research topic, but a research problem is instead something that the existing literature on the topic has so far failed to investigate, or has investigated poorly. The problem will be stated succinctly in a single sentence or two, but it will be based on and found in a full literature review.
When you've fully explored the literature on your topic and related topics, you'll have learned what issues have not yet been fully explored. These are "gaps" in the existing literature. For example, regarding the topic of how to motivate people to achieve goals, you might find that there is a good deal of research on various kinds of motivation, but that there is a lack of research on motivating people with particular kinds of resistance to being motivated. This would be a gap in the literature.
Another kind of research problem arises when there are weaknesses in the existing research. For instance, you might discover that the existing studies in your particular discipline, although they tackle motivation, their research designs are not well done. The research problem then would be to design a new study in a more rigorous and robust way.
A third kind of research problem arises when findings from earlier studies raise new questions that are of interest to the field. Suppose a previous study shows that adults who are experiencing a life transition (divorce, for instance) are more easily motivated to learn new things. Why might that be? The fact that this question has not been investigated yet is a research problem.
Many articles, in their discussion section, suggest or recommend additional studies on the topic. Each of these forms a research problem. Now, let's look more closely at how you can shape a research topic into a good research problem statement.
When you write your dissertation, you will have covered all the existing literature related to your topic. Not some. All. You'll be perhaps the most up-to-date author on that topic. Other scholars will expect you to know just about all there is to know about your topic –which is a good reason for keeping it narrow!
For instance, using our example of how to motivate people to achieve something, you could search a variety of databases, even those not necessarily in your own discipline. For example, if you're in education and you want to know about motivating students, you might start with the studies of motivation in the psychology journals, where that is a major topic. A business learner interested in learning how managers can motivate higher production in workers might start in the sociological databases. Searching other disciplines is always important. For instance, an educator might have an interest in the impact of a parent's death on children's school performance. Why stop with the education literature? Medical research is interested in death, and psychiatric or nursing journals are interested in the effects of death in families. There are customs around death in all cultures, and these affect children, so studies in anthropological journals, ethnographic journals, and sociological journals would be important. Also, the field of mortuary science may have plenty to say about the impact of a parent's death on the children. You might also look into clergy and pastoral counseling journals, theological journals, family education journals, and so on. It never hurts to check what is being written in related fields to your topic.
You want lots of material. The Capella librarians estimate that the references actually used in a dissertation are about one-third of those that were reviewed. Funnel all your articles (and you should copy and keep them so your searching is not wasted!) by reading the abstracts first. Categorize them by how closely they match your core interest in the topic. Use RefWorks or some other kind of log system to keep careful notes about each of the articles you read. Start by including the title, author, year, and journal, then a note about the central focus and finding identified in the abstract. Later you can go back and start reading the full article. For now, get them into categories so you know which ones to study first.
After you've read all the abstracts you've collected, you'll have a basic knowledge of what's known about the topic, and so you can now refocus your own topic statement. Make sure that, after sifting through all the abstracts, your statement accurately captures what you want to know. Compile a clean, concise, elegant sentence. Consider that sentence your "lodestar," or the guiding idea you'll now delve deeply into the literature.
Keep reading. This stage is when you immerse yourself in the literature, so don't prematurely close off. If you come across a blindingly wonderful article, save it for sure, but don't stop. Don't stop until you have a pretty clear picture of the whole subject. All the arguments, all the controversies, all the mixed evidence, who the experts are—they are the folks who will be looking at your work. Let yourself start becoming familiar with what Jones or Smith or Harris or Tweed says, and how the others respond to what they say. Take notes on everything that you find so you can refer back to the sources when you are finally writing up your literature review.
Now that you've read so much, your lodestar statement probably is of interest to many scholars. As you learn more and more about the overall issue, keep refining that lodestar sentence or sentences. Dig deeper. As you read and study, start looking for those four kinds of research problems. For example, sticking with our example, not much may be known about how a parent's death affects young adults in college. You'll probably have a list of multiple research problems, as your literature search and review deepens and broadens.
As you read and reread your articles and keep searching, start communicating personally with the authors who speak most directly to your lodestar interest. Ask them what they think the next study on the topic should be. As you study, you'll start developing what will be your particular research problem. Some gap, some weakness, some new question will appeal to you. Something will stand out as a particularly meaningful or useful or relevant "next step" that you can take in the research community.
Write it out. Make it a single sentence, at most two. When you write your full literature review, you'll have shown what is already known about the topic, and you'll have shown the support you've found for your research problem—both in the existing literature and from personal communications with the experts in the field.
When you have got your research problem statement written out, ask some trusted people to review it, or send it by email to some of the experts you consulted with before. Ask them to pose questions about it, challenges to it, objections. Ask them to be critical.
And if you can't answer the objections or questions or challenges, there are two likely reasons:
If on the other hand, you answer the questions, defuse the challenges, and rebut the objections, you're there. You've got your research problem statement. Now it's just a matter of turning that into a research question, but that's a subject for another day.
These lines sum this up:
Now you can return to the courseroom and finish the remaining study activities and assessments.
Thanks very much for your attention, and good luck crafting your research problem statements, which no doubt will change greatly in the months ahead.
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